“I don’t know anything about marketing or branding. Here’s what I do believe. The purpose of what we’re here for is to optimize the resonance and relevance for those we serve. That’s how I hold this whole term of marketing. What’s really going to make us great is if we create a bonfire brand. A brand that people are actually drawn to. Where there’s a conversation. And they’re partaking in your conversation. They’re evangelists for your brand. They’ll defend your brand. They’re also your most ardent critics. It’s a beautiful thing when you can sit around a campfire with those you serve and they can tell you everything that’s great and everything that’s not so great. Instead of holding it as a brand, hold it as a bonfire.”

It’s early going here, but I’m already feeling good about this book: seriously science-y (but not too much), self-deprecating (or at least self-aware). Take notes, man who wrote Buy-ology.

Anyway, to get to the crickets. Watts is talking about synchrony, and the mechanisms which lead to systems (in this particular case the aforementioned chirpers) becoming synchronized. Here, he writes about how inputs from all the crickets in the system affect the way the rate of chirp-ery in the system oscillates.

This got me thinking about Twitter, and why it might be useful in a way I hadn’t considered before. In a cultural system, like ours, that’s increasingly fractured (see: splintered media, death of meta-narrative, collapse of mass channels, panic!, etc.) could we be losing out on the inputs that guide our our synchrony with our fellow mortal coil shufflers? That is to say, are we less able to hear the chirps?

And in such a system, can something like Twitter begin to function as a sort of cultural rudder – a way of checking what the rest of the crickets are up to as a way of normalizing our own behaviour?

Star Wars: Uncut is an experiment in re-imagination. This is what brands now need the courage to do: open the doors to the vault and let their meaning be shaped by the people who do, or could, love them.

Part of the story of the auto industry’s evolution – or extinction – will be geographic. Shuttered plants, closed down towns… :30 TV spots aren’t going to be enough to erase the impact on the landscape of North America that the collapse of the auto brands is going to have. These are touchable psychic scars.

Not to get all caught up in Aesopian fable-making, but there’s a lesson to be learned here about having your perspective shifted.

Upside-down bananas should not be mind blowing.

But after 30 or so years of thumbnailing banana peels, this seems strangely game-changing. Of course there’s a better way to peel bananas (and, for the record, banana producers of the world: I’ve been eating your fruit at a ridiculous pace since watching this video), and of course it’s this simple. It’s instantly adoptable change.

The ancientart of stop motion entertainment. There’s something about the hand-crafted feel of this that imparts a joy that CGI just can’t hold a flickering candle to. Dead on target for the DIY skatepunk aesthetic, too, one presumes: truly gnarly strategy. Well played.